what Professor Murray says:--

His contemporary public denounced him as dull, because he tortured
them with personal problems; as malignant, because he made them see
truths they wished not to see; as blasphemous and foul-minded, because
he made demands on their religious and spiritual natures which they
could neither satisfy nor overlook. They did not know whether he was
too wildly imaginative or too realistic, too romantic or too prosaic,
too childishly simple or too philosophical--Aristophanes says he was
all these things at once. They only knew that he made them angry and
that they could not help listening to him.

Does not that remind you a little of what was said all over England of
Mr. Bernard Shaw? Of what is still said about him in many London houses
to-day? If some one praises him, the majority of people will tell you
that he is overrated. Does it not remind you of the reception which
Ibsen's plays met when they were first produced here: when they gave an
impetus to that new English drama which I understand is decaying, though
it seems to me to be only beginning--the new English Drama of Mr.
Granville Barker, Mr. Housman, Mr. Arnold Bennett, Mr. Galsworthy, and
Mr. Masefield?

Every year the patient research of scholars by the consultation of
original documents has caused us to readjust our historical perspective.
Those villains of our childhood, Tiberius, Richard III., Mary Tudor, and
others, have become respectable monarchs, almost model monarchs, if you
compare them with the popular English view of the present King of the
Belgians, the ex-Sultan of Turkey, and the present Czar of Russia. It is
realised that contemporary journalism gave a somewhat twopence coloured
impression of Kings and Queens, who were only creatures of their age,
less admirable expressions of the individualism of their time. And just
as historical facts require readjustment by posterity, so our critical
estimate of intellectual and aesthetic evolution requires strict
revision. We must not accept the glib statement of the historian,
especially of the contemporary historian, that at certain periods
intellectual activity and artistic expression were decaying or did not
exist. If a convention in one field of intellectual activity is said by
the historian or chronicler to be approaching termination or to be
decaying, as he calls it, we should test carefully his data and his
credentials. But, assuming he i